When a cherished pet goes missing, social media can be a blessing — but it can also be a place where rumours are born and facts lost.

Thankfully, according to Regina law enforcement and the Humane Society, online rumours of dog thefts and fight rings are greatly exaggerated.

“Certainly, there are dogs and such that do get stolen,” said Bill Thorn with the Regina Humane Society. “It’s not like it never happens. But, like so many other things on social media, it’s blown way out of proportion, and it’s just not the problem that social media would tell you that it is … We do get the odd case but very, very few where there’s actually evidence that an animal was stolen. I think people jump to a lot of conclusions.”

He said what often seems to happen on social media is similar to the verbal rumour mill, where a piece of information — or misinformation — is passed along until the story has changed completely and the truth lost.

“All of a sudden, a little dog that got out because the latch wasn’t properly latched, it’s in a fighting ring down in Arizona or something,” Thorn said. “And we find this a lot with social media … The truth gets lost very, very quickly. That’s what we’ve found.”

Not to say social media hasn’t done a great job in spreading the word when a pet disappears, often helping owners find their furry family members. But Thorn said while it can be a wonderful thing in that regard, social media has “an evil other edge to it.”

That is a sentiment with which Anita Klassen, site administrator for Regina Lost & Found Pet Alerts — a Facebook page that works to reunite missing pets with worried owners — agrees. She said while thefts do happen, it isn’t nearly as common as some people seem to believe.

“A lot of people think their dog was stolen, but they’ll find it wandering later,” she said. “So chances are it just got out. If a dog can get out, a dog will get out if it wants out, because they like to run.”

She added neighbourhood children or even the wind can open gates, allowing animals out, or escape artist pets can worm their way through gaps in otherwise-secured fenced yards.

Klassen surmised the reason people might jump to the conclusion dogs are being stolen is because social media allows users to see, more than ever before, how many animals go missing. Where owners once put up posters, they are now taking to social media with posts that sometimes garner thousands of shares.

“(Pets going missing has) always happened, but now you can see that it’s happening because of social media,” she said.

Regina Police Service spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich took a similar position, saying there aren’t as many reports of dog thefts in the city as some social media posts suggest, and a number of those dogs reported stolen might simply be missing. One possibility, for example, is that a frightened Fluffy simply fled through the door an intruder left open during a break and enter.

Police have a number of outstanding reports of theft in which dogs have not been found — though Popowich pointed out there is no way to know whether these are actual cases of theft or whether the dog is simply otherwise missing. In 2013, police took eight such reports and nine each in 2014 and 2015 (one case last year involved two dogs, so 10 dogs in total were reported stolen).

“I don’t think we have anything that would suggest these cases are connected,” Popowich said. “And so it doesn’t appear that it’s the work of a single suspect or a group of suspects … We have no way of knowing if they are truly thefts or the dog is simply missing, because we don’t have enough information to conclude it one way or another.”

In terms of dog fight rings — mentioned in some social media posts as a potential motive for dog theft — while they are not unheard of in other parts of the country, Popowich and Thorn said there is no evidence at this point of anything similar in Regina.

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